Exactly! The default CSS browser stylesheet is a reverse engineering of how Netscape 2.0 rendered HTML. It had to be, since otherwise CSS wouldn't be backwards

Exactly! The default CSS browser stylesheet is a reverse engineering of how Netscape 2.0 rendered HTML. It had to be, since otherwise CSS wouldn't be backwards compatible, which would have killed it. But it was also a good starting point because browsers had to solve this exact problem: Layout text so it it readable regardless of screen dimensions. Except that HTML rending was never specified (and varied significantly between browsers), so CSS basically codified the defacto HTML rendering in mainstream browsers, and then described this as the "browser style sheet". CSS then allowed the author to override anything they wanted to change. But the default for anything not overriden was the browser style sheet, which was a sane default which adapted to all screen sizes.